A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat

A frieze of modern life

La Grande Jatte is a long island in the Seine just outside Paris, where people went on Sundays to walk, fish, row and sit in the shade. Seurat fills its bank with them: a man in a sleeveless vest lying on the grass with a pipe, women under parasols, a small girl in white at the centre, a woman fishing at the water’s edge, a black dog nosing the grass, and at the right a couple in profile, the woman with a monkey on a leash. Sailing boats and a rowing crew pass on the river. Nobody quite looks at anyone else. The stillness is deliberate: Seurat wanted a picture of modern life with the order of a classical frieze.

Two years of dots

Seurat began the picture in 1884 and made many drawn and painted studies for it. He then went back to it, enlarging some figures, adding others, and covering the surface with small touches of contrasting colour set side by side, to mix in the eye rather than on the palette; the method became known as pointillism. He showed the painting at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition in 1886, and a few years later added the painted border of dots around its edge.

Where it hangs

The painting has been at the Art Institute of Chicago since 1924, in the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, and measures 207.5 by 308.1 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 9,000-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 60 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Art Institute of Chicago · Wikidata Q1044742 · Wikimedia Commons